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Thirteen dollars. Fourteen DJs. FOUR ROOMS. Yeah, you should know by now that when it comes to Halloween, we do not fuck around. And this fine, fine poster is currently on sale in our store for a paltry ten of your American Dollars.

Also: Look, here's an insanely expensive new fire alarm that I do not want or need and that will absolutely benefit no one in any way at all. But on the other hand, my assumption that underneath all that paint and muck was a quite nice floor turned out to be true:

So they make us put in this ridiculous fifteen-fucking-thousand dollar fire alarm system, which is the most useless thing in the world. Both buildings already have sprinkler heads every three damned feet: heat opens the valve, water flows, flow detector calls FD. Done. But no, that's not good enough, now they insist on literally dozens of sirens and strobes (um, in a nightclub) and a sound-system cutoff, and smoke detectors (um, in a nightclub). The guy who installed it said, "Oh, yeah, your fog machine will definitely set off the smoke detectors. Anything sets them off, even bad breath, if you get too close." So that's gonna be, you know, A Problem.

All these extra sensors required miles of additional hard conduit, because you also aren't allowed to put them in the same conduit as anything else. That's not labor-intensive or anything. Just running the wires took weeks.

This alarm does absolutely fuck-all to improve safety. All it does it guarantee that we're going to have more false alarms because of its ridiculous and unnecessary complexity (we've already had several), and it will eventually make us need to issue a bunch of refunds when the stupid thing kills the sound in the middle of an event.

So we had our inspection for this white elephant of a fire alarm and the inspector insisted on some tweak to one sensor, and wanted to come back and re-inspect once that was done. This was last Monday. "Oh, but I'm out of town until next week." So we called to see if we could get a different inspector to do it sooner. That other guy said, "Hey, you have a hood above your ovens, that's not on the fire alarm plan." "That's because it wasn't in our scope of work at all, we didn't touch anything over there." "Well it's got to be hooked in to the alarm, too." "But... these plans have been approved for months... And the hood's not even electronic, it's fully mechanical... What... Our real inspector didn't have a problem with it!" "Well I guess you'd better get him to sign off on it then, because I'm a dick."

So that lost us a week. For no reason.

We finally passed that alarm inspection, which was our last, so at this point we've gotten job-card signatures on everything, and all that's left is for the building inspector to sign, basically just confirming that all the other inspections are done. It's a meta-signature. Can we bring the paperwork down to him and have him just sign it? No. He wants to come back out one more time. But he's so busy, he can't make it until Thursday. "Busy? But it will be faster for you if I bring it to you!" "No, I'm too busy for that." As far as I can tell, he's not coming back out here to actually inspect anything, but just to... sign the card while he's in our building.

So that lost us a second week. For no reason.

Gaaaaaaah! We're supposed to be open in 18 days! We have no time for this nonsense!

Meanwhile, the crew have been busting their butts putting the final finishes on things. Look, we have a stage now! Plus a sound booth, and the speakers are hung. And here's the DNA Lounge HazMat Team lining the stairwell with fiberglass duct liner and wire mesh, to turn it into the same kind of anechoic chamber that the DNA Lounge entryways are. It's a lot of work, because the ceiling of that stairwell goes all the way up to a second floor skylight. Even though it's not all finished, it seems to be working pretty well already: when you step into the alcove, it feels like your ears have suddenly become clogged.

The soundproofing between the two buildings will be a work in progress, since we don't really know what all will be needed until we've had the whole club up and running, but there will probably be more of the duct liner in the doorway alcoves and on the hallway ceiling.

Based on these two reviews, I think it's safe to say that reviews of the Das Racist show were... mixed:

Review One: "The performances were all pretty tight, and went off without a hitch. It was a pretty raucous show on stage, and the house was definitely bumping [...] lots of energy and great performances."

Review Two: "They gave me what was by far the worst concert I've attended [...] The only thing I could hope for from these people was that they would stop. On the plus side, [...] meeting people at concerts can be hard, but when you have as good an opening topic as how terrible that DJ was, things become easy."

So there's that.

No photos yet of this week's tragically under-attended Hubba Hubba Revue -- which, to our great sadness, was the last monthly Hubba Hubba Revue at DNA Lounge. They will still be appearing regularly as a part of Bootie, but they're moving their monthly show to more clown-infested waters.

Apparently we're going to be the backdrop in an nVidia commercial (maybe a web-only thing? I'm not sure). Let me know if you see it, because I'm sure they won't remember to tell us that it has aired.

If we didn't invite you, I am terribly sorry, that was an embarrassing oversight! Please stop by on Saturday or Wednesday to see it!

Anyway, it was amazing. It went better than I would have expected in my wildest dreams. Flawless victory. Here are some photos.

The plan had been to finish construction late Sunday night, spend Monday cleaning, and get a nice, long gear-check on Tuesday afternoon. As you might imagine, the reality was very different. Table saws and hammers were still in full effect late Tuesday afternoon, and someone had to go to the store and buy the audio snake about 30 minutes before the first band's sound check.

Despite this, both bands sounded fantastic, the lights looked great, and everyone seemed to have a wonderful time! I sure did.

We have a really amazing staff here, and our construction crew (heroically wrangled by Devon over the last couple of months, give him a hand) really pulled it all together at the last minute, and made us all look like we might actually know what we're doing!

The new rooms are awesome. I can't wait until you see them.

Also, the soundproofing turned out shockingly well. Now that we have the duct liner all the way up to the second floor ceiling of the stairwell, once you've taken two steps inside the doorway it sounds like someone has closed the door behind you. You're halfway up the stairs before you're sure that there's a band on stage. Also it kind of looks like one of the interior Death Star chasms, so bonus points for that. And though you can see the band playing from the street, you can't hear them at all through the windows. Yeah, we might know what we're doing!

We started negotiating to buy the pizza restaurant in mid-2010, closed escrow on it in February 2011, and finally began construction upstairs in February 2012, so we've been at this for a bit over two years -- and we're finally done. I don't even know what to make of that.